A Son of Hagar Part 80

The man stared, and then smiled, but he quickly reconciled himself to the unexpected. With extraordinary alacrity he labeled the luggage, and bowled off to the north train, which was already at the platform.

It was now within three minutes of midnight, and Mrs. Drayton had joined Greta in the bustling throng on the platform.

"Oh, I feel as if a thousand hearts were all swelling and beating in my breast at once," said Greta. "Mrs. Drayton, is it certain that he will come? Porter, have you put the luggage in the van? Which is the train--the left?"

"No, miss, the left's going out to make room for the local train up from Kentish Town and Hendon. The right's your train, miss. Got your ticket, miss?"

"Not yet. Must I get it, think you? Is the time short? Yes, I will get two tickets myself," she added, turning to the landlady. "Then when he comes he will have nothing to do but step into the carriage."

"You'll have to be quick, miss--train's nigh due out--only a minute,"

said the porter.

Greta's luminous eyes were peering over the heads of the people that were about her. Then they brightened, with a flash more swift than lightning, and all her face wore in an instant a heavenly smile. "Ah, he is there--there at the back--at the booking-office--run to him, run my good, dear creature; run and tell him I am here! I'll find a compartment and have the door open."

Greta tripped along the platform with the foot of a deer. In another moment she had a carriage door open, and she stood there with the handle in her hand. She saw him coming who was more than all the world to her.

But she did not look twice. No, she would not look twice. She would wait until they were within, alone, together.

Side by side with him walked Hugh Ritson. Could it be possible? And was it he who had brought her husband? Ah! he had repented, and it was only she who had been bitter to the end. How generous of him! how cruel of her!

Her eyes fell, and a warm flush overspread her cheeks as he who came first stepped into the carriage. She did not look again at him, nor did he look again at her. She knew he did not, though her eyes were down.

"Oh, when we are alone!" she thought, and then she turned to Hugh Ritson.

The heavenly smile was still on her beautiful face, and the deep light in her eyes spoke of mingled joy and grief.

"Hugh, I fear, I fear," she faltered, "I have been hard and cruel. Let us be friends; let me be your dearest sister."

He looked at her in silence. His infirm foot trailed a pace. He saw what was in her heart, and he knew well what was in his own heart, too; he thought of the blow that he was about to strike her.

She held out her hand, and took in hers his own unresisting fingers. Ay, he knew that there and then he was about to break that forgiving heart forever. He knew who had stepped into that carriage.

She leaned forward and kissed his cheek. The man in him could bear up no longer. He broke down; he could not speak; he was choked with emotion.

She turned to the landlady, who stood near, twitching at the ribbons of her bonnet and peering into the carriage.

"Good-bye, Mrs. Drayton, and G.o.d bless you for what you have done for my husband!"

The landlady muttered something that was inaudible; she was confused; she stammered, and then was silent.

Greta stepped into the carriage. The guard was standing at the door. The bell had been rung. The train had been signaled. The whistle had sounded. The clocks were striking midnight.

"Wait! Wait!"

It was a voice from the end of the platform. The guard turned with a smile to see who called on a train to wait. An old gentleman in silk stockings and gaiters, with long white hair flowing under the broad brim of a low-crowned hat, came panting to the only door that was still open.

"Quick, sir, it's moving; in with you!"

"Mr. Christian!" cried Greta, and throwing her arms about him, she drew him into the carriage. Then the train began to move away.

At that instant another train--the local train from Kentish Town and Hendon--steamed up to the opposite side of the platform. Before it had stopped two men leaped out. They were the two police-sergeants.

Instantly--simultaneously--a man burst through the barrier and ran on to the platform from the street. He was bareheaded, and his face was ghastly white. In one moment the police-sergeants had laid hands upon him. The train to the north had not yet cleared the platform. He saw it pa.s.sing out. He took hold of the hands by which he was held and threw them off, as if their grasp had been the grasp of a child. Then he bounded away toward the retreating train. It was now moving rapidly. It was gone; it was swallowed up in the dark mouth beyond, and the man stood behind, bareheaded, dripping with perspiration, yet white as ashes, his clothes awry, the collar of his frieze ulster torn away, and a strip of red flannel lining exposed.

It was Paul Ritson.

The police-sergeants hurried up with the re-enforcement of two porters to recover their man. But he was quiet enough now. He did not stir a muscle when they handcuffed him. He looked around with vague, vacant eyes, hardly seeming to realize where he was or what was being done with him. His frenzy was gone.

They led him down the platform. Hugh Ritson was standing on the spot where Greta had left him one minute before. When the company neared that spot the prisoner stopped. He looked across at Hugh Ritson in silence, and for an instant the dazed look died off his face. Then he turned his head aside, and allowed himself to be led quietly away.

CHAPTER XXI.

A morning paper, of November--, contained the following paragraph:

"It will be remembered that in the reports of the disastrous railway collision, which occurred at Hendon on Friday last, it was mentioned as a ghastly accessory to the story of horror that an injured pa.s.senger, who had been lifted from the debris of broken carriages, and put to lie out of harm's way in a field close at hand, was brutally a.s.saulted and (apparently) robbed by some unknown scoundrel, who, though detected in the act itself, tore himself from the grasp of Police-Sergeant c.o.x, of the Hendon division of the metropolitan police force, and escaped in the darkness. The authorities were determined that their vigilance should not be eluded, and a person named Paul Drayton is now in custody, and will be brought up at Bow Street this morning. It turns out that Drayton is an innkeeper at Hendon, where he has long borne a dubious character. He was arrested at midnight in St. Pancras Station, in a daring and mad attempt to escape by the north-bound train, and it is understood that the incident of his capture is such as reflects the highest credit on the resolution, energy, and intrepidity of the force."

The same paper, of the day after, contained this further paragraph:

"The man Drayton, who was yesterday formally committed to take his trial at the Central Criminal Court, will be brought up at the Old Bailey to-morrow; and as the evidence is said to be of a simple and unconflicting character, it is not expected that the hearing will extend over a single day. It is stated that the accused, who observed a rigid silence during yesterday's proceedings, will, on his trial, set up the extraordinary defense of mistaken ident.i.ty."

An evening paper of Friday, November--, contained the following remarks in the course of a leading note:

"It is a familiar legal maxim that a plea of alibi that breaks down is the worst of all accusations. The scoundrel that attempted to rob a dying man, who lay helpless and at his mercy amid the confusion of Friday night's accident at Hendon, was audacious enough to put forth the defense that he was not the man he was taken for. Cases of mistaken ident.i.ty are, of course, common enough in the annals of jurisprudence, but we imagine the instances are rare indeed of evidence of ident.i.ty so exceptional and conclusive as that which convicted the Hendon innkeeper being susceptible of error. The very clothes he wore in the dock bore their own witness to his guilt, and the court saw the police-sergeant produce a sc.r.a.p of cloth torn from the guilty man's back, which exactly fitted a rent in the prisoner's ulster. The whole case would be a case of criminality too gross and palpable to merit a syllable of comment but for the astounding a.s.surance with which the accused adhered to his plea in the face of evidence that was so complete as to make denial little more than a farce. He denied that he was Paul Drayton, and said his name was Paul Ritson. He was identified as Drayton by several witnesses who have known him from infancy; among others by his old mother, Martha Drayton, whose evidence (given with reluctance, and with more tears than a son so unnatural deserved) was at once as d.a.m.ning and as painful as anything of the kind ever heard in a court of justice. The claim to be Paul Ritson was answered by the evidence of Mr. Hugh Ritson, mine-owner in c.u.mberland, and brother of the gentleman whom the prisoner wished to personate. Mr. H. Ritson admitted a resemblance, but had no hesitation in saying that the accused was not his brother. The prisoner thereupon applied to the court that the wife of Paul Ritson should be examined, but, as it was explained that both husband and wife were at present ill in c.u.mberland, the court wisely ruled against the application. As a final freak of defense, the prisoner asked for the examination of one Mercy Fisher, who, he said, would be able to say by what circ.u.mstances he came to wear the clothes of the guilty man. The court adjourned for an hour in order that this person might be produced, but on rea.s.sembling it was explained that the girl, who turned out to be a mistress whom Drayton had kept at his mother's house, had disappeared. Thus, with a well-merited sentence of three years' penal servitude, ended a trial of which the vulgarity of detail was only equalled by the audacity of defense."

A week pa.s.sed, and the public had almost forgotten the incidents of the trial, when the following paragraph appeared in a weekly journal:

"I have heard that the man who was sentenced to three years' penal servitude for robbery at the scene of the Hendon accident was seized with an attack of brain fever immediately upon his arrival at Millbank. The facts that transpire within that place of retirement are whispered with as much reserve as guards the secrets of another kind of confessional, but I do hear that since the admission of the man who was known on his trial as Paul Drayton, and who is now indicated by a numerical cognomen, certain facts have come to light which favor the defense he set up of mistaken ident.i.ty."

CHAPTER XXII.

The chapter room of St. Margaret's Convent was a chill, bare chamber containing an oak table and four or five plain oak chairs. On the painted walls, which were of dun gray, there was an etching by a Florentine master of the flight into Egypt, and a symbolic print of the Sacred Heart. Besides these pictures there was but a single text to relieve the blindness of the empty walls, and it ran: "Where the tree falls, there it must lie."

Four days after Greta's departure from the house wherein she had been received as a temporary boarder, the superior sat in the chapter room, and a sister knelt at her feet. The sister's habit was gray and her linen cape was plain. She wore no scapular, and no hood above the close cap that hid her hair and crossed her forehead. She was, therefore, a lay sister; she was Sister Grace.

"Mother, hear my sin," she said in a trembling whisper.

"Speak on, daughter."

"We were both at Athlone in the year of the great famine. He was an officer in a regiment quartered there. I was a novice of the choir in the Order of Charity. We met in scenes sanctified by religion. Oh, mother, the famine was sore, and he was kind to the famished people!

'The hunger is on us,' they would cry, as if it had been a plague of locusts. It was thus, with their shrill voices and wan faces, that the ragged mult.i.tudes followed us. Yes, mother, he was very, very kind to the people."

"Well?"